Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [71]
At the same time as the excesses and uproars, Schumann turned to the private world of composing with more and more exhilaration. After a few attempts at composition, at age twenty-two he completed the brilliant set of piano pieces called Papillons, which began a decade of heated creativity that finally accounted for much of his finest and most original work, including the piano collections Carnaval, Kreisleriana, and Kinderszenen, dozens of songs, and the first movement of the A Minor Piano Concerto. In pieces of this era, Schumann epitomized the poetically lyrical strain of Romantic music, found fresh ways of writing for the piano, and made himself the finest composer of German lieder since Schubert.
In 1831, trying to write his novel in the direction of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kreisler stories and their mirrored identities, Schumann discovered his own alter egos, avatars of a fragmented consciousness: impulsive Florestan, poetic and scholarly Eusebius, plus the classicist Master Raro in the image of Friedrich Wieck, and Cilia who was also Clara.11 Schumann made use of his personas when he began his career as a music critic. In his first article, Eusebius sweeps into the room and cries to his comrades, “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!” and opens the score of Chopin’s Opus 2. Eventually in his writings Schumann’s fictitious band became the Davidsbündler, the little League of David fighting the giants of empty virtuosity and philistinism. In the ten years from 1834 that Schumann founded and ran his journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, he used his imaginary voices to promote progressive composers from the distinguished to the disappointing. History has mainly remembered the times Schumann was right—notably about Chopin, Berlioz, and Mendelssohn. The last-named became Schumann’s friend and lifelong hero.
Even in his most productive periods Schumann’s infirmity lingered, manifesting as hypochondria, hallucinatory episodes, fantasies of suicide, periods of outright breakdown. A mechanical device he invented to strengthen his hands for the keyboard crippled the middle finger of his right hand and destroyed any hope of a piano career.12 His obsession with young men continued. His relations with Friedrich Wieck and his composition teachers were fractious and unsatisfying. And gradually, as the years went by, Schumann found himself falling in love with his teacher’s prodigy daughter, Clara.
CLARA AND ROBERT always had a teasing relationship, but during her teens the games and jokes took on more significance. Yet at the same time as their attraction heated up, Schumann began an affair with a teenager named Ernestine von Fricken. The main consequence of that romance, other than a period of estrangement from Clara, was the virtuosic piano pieces called Carnaval, whose twenty movements are unified by the melodic motive A-S-C-H. That is the name of Ernestine’s hometown, in German musical terms the notes A-E-C-B; in the piece they are sometimes reformed into E-C-B-A (S-C-H-A) and A♭C-B (As-C-H). Schumann felt a mystical correspondence in the fact that S-C-H also began his own name.
Besides those cabalistic games with musical letters, the movements of Carnaval have portraits of Eusebius, Florestan, Chopin, Paganini, Ernestine/Estrella, and Chiarina (another name for Clara). In 1835, when Clara was nearly sixteen, Schumann broke with Ernestine. Soon after, he wrote in his journal, “beautiful hours in [Clara’s] arms.”13
Friedrich Wieck, outraged at this challenge to his authority, and probably